I've been coding in PHP for a few years, but I've never been exposed to
any of the PHP frameworks. I've been curious about Code
Igniter and
Symfony for a while, but I haven't
had time to play with either of them. Until now.

I decided to pick up Symfony first. One of the biggest reasons is that
Netbeans has a Symfony
plugin to
help ease development. Secondly, there is an
on-line
(and print) book that walks a new user through developing a full
application. Symfony has some pretty cool things, like the ability to
use different ORMs, an MVC design pattern, and different environments.
The different environments feature is really neat -- if I'm developing
an application, I can enter the development environment by calling my
app through a different URL. This different URL will still call my app,
but it will also enable logging, disable caching, show me all
exceptions, etc, etc. If I want to see how it acts in production, I can
simply call the same app through a different URL. Pretty cool!

There have been a few different apps that I've wanted to write for a
while. I'm not too far into the Symfony documentation, but I'm starting
to think that developing some of these apps would be a good exercise.
I'd talk more about my ideas, but I want to be able to flesh them out
before they get stolen :p.